Drone hits Russia’s Black Sea Fleet headquarters

Kyiv, July 31

A drone-borne explosive device detonated on Sunday at the headquarters of Russia’s Black Sea Fleet, injuring six persons, officials said.

The explosion at the headquarters in the city of Sevastopol on the Crimean peninsula that Russia annexed from Ukraine in 2014 caused cancellation of observances of Russia’s Navy Day holiday.

The Black Sea Fleet’s press service said the drone appeared to be homemade. It described the explosive device as “low-power” but Sevastopol mayor Mikhail Razvozhaev said six persons were injured in the blast. There was no immediate information on where the drone began its flight; Sevastopol is about 170 km south of the Ukrainian mainland and Russian forces control much of the mainland area along the Black Sea.

Fighting continued elsewhere in Ukraine. The mayor of the major port city of Mykolaiv, Vitaliy Kim, said shelling killed one of Ukraine’s richest men, Oleksiy Vadatursky, and his wife. Vadatursky headed a grain production and export business. In the Sumy region in Ukraine’s north, near the Russian border, shelling killed one person, the regional administration said.

Mykhailo Podolyak, an adviser to Zelenskyy, said on Twitter that images of a prison, where at least 53 Ukrainian prisoners of war died in an explosion on Friday indicated that the blast came from within the building in Olenivka, which is under Russian control. Russian officials have claimed the building was attacked by Ukraine with the aim of silencing POWs who might be giving information about Ukrainian military operations.

Satellite photos taken before and after the attack show that a small, squarish building in the middle of the Olenivka prison complex was demolished, its roof in splinters. Podolyak said those images and the lack of damage to adjacent structures showed that the building was not attacked from the air or by artillery and contended the evidence was consistent with a hyperbaric bomb set off inside. — AP

Zelenskyy orders evacuation in Donetsk

• Ukraine President Volodymyr Zelenskyy ordered the mandatory evacuation of people in the eastern Donetsk region after a fight between Russia and Ukraine escalated in the DPR region.
• Zelenskyy said the hundreds of thousands of people in combat zones in the larger Donbas region were at life-threatening risks and needed to leave.
• Logistics and support operations were being handled by the authorities “from A to Z”, he said. ANI